Since the fall of housing prices over the last few years, many home owners seem determined to get at least their purchase price out of their home for sale, while many others are looking to recoup the amount of money that they’ve paid into their homes. While this seems like a reasonable strategy, when you consider that the fall in housing prices has greatly reduced the amount of money that many of these homes are worth now, it is easy to see how listing your home at possibly a hugely inflated price is most certainly going to hurt your chance of a sale.

There are many problems with pricing your home with unrealistic expectations, as you can well imagine. Firstly, if you price your home like you’re trying to sell it to home buyers who’ve taken a time machine trip from 2005, you’re likely to not get many people coming to look at your home. Anyone who is looking for homes in the price range that you’ve set for your home is probably going to be looking at substantially nicer or larger homes than yours because your home should be priced in a lower bracket. If you do get any prospective buyers coming through to tour your home, you are likely to not get many offers—at least not in the range that you’re looking for.

What home owners might not realize though, is that a home that sits on the market for long periods of time isn’t encouraging for prospective buyers; they see that a property has been on the market for months—maybe with small drops in the outrageous asking price—and decide that all the other buyers out there have already decided that it’s not a property that’s worth buying. In addition, you’ve had to keep your home in a show-ready state for months in case a realtor calls to show your house; this can be merely a hassle to keep a home in a permanently staged state and it can also cost you money if you’re renting furniture or having a house cleaner come in to help you keep it immaculate.

For your best results in home selling, consult your realtor for their judgment on what kind of listing price they think that you should start with; many listing agents won’t even take on a client if they insist on pricing their home completely unreasonably because they know that it can be a waste of time to go through all that work for something that isn’t going to sell.